


Touch Starved

by lunarlychallenged



Series: Katherine Adopts the Newsies [2]
Category: Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: F/M, Honestly guys, I don't know why I insist on writing things with no plot, Katherine and Race are such a BrOTP, Race goes to the dentist, but here we are
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-13
Updated: 2018-03-13
Packaged: 2019-03-30 16:43:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13955742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunarlychallenged/pseuds/lunarlychallenged
Summary: Katherine begins to understand why the newsies touch each other so often after taking Race to the dentist.





	Touch Starved

“I ain’t coming with you,” Race said stubbornly. His cigar jutted from his lips, his eyes flashed, and Katherine could have just screamed. He was acting like a child.

“You absolutely are, Racetrack Higgins, or I’ll - I’ll,” she faltered. He was acting like a child, sure, but that didn’t mean that he was one. He was only a year or two younger than her, after all, and she was not the boss of him. “It’ll only get worse,” she said softly.

His hand rose to rub at his jaw. He’d had a toothache for weeks, and when Katherine had finally convinced her to pry his mouth open to have a look, one of his back molars had been black at the root. She had been trying to convince him to go to the dentist for days, but he was adamantly against it.

“It ain’t worth it,” he huffed. “I’ll miss a day’s work, and I can’t afford that. I can’t afford to go to the dentist, either.”

“It can be my Christmas present to you,” she wheedled. Much more expensive than any gift she would have gotten him, but she would be willing to take that blow if it meant he lost that wounded puppy expression. She would just have to stop buying that nice shampoo for a while. Well, more than a while. Months.

His eyes brightened. “You’s gettin’ me a present?”

“Not if you don’t go to the dentist,” she said smugly. “If you come, we’ll get a snack after.”

He chomped down on his cigar, shoulders drooping. “Oh, alright. If it hurts, I’s never forgiving you for this.”

“It already hurts,” she pointed out. She bumped her shoulder against his and left. 

Jack was waiting outside, leaning against the wall as though he hadn’t been waiting just for her. “He in?”

She nodded, grinning broadly. “I told you I could convince him.”

“None of us go to the dentist. It’s the place where kids go to die,” Jack said with a crooked smile.

“I go to the dentist, and I haven’t died.”

He wrapped an arm around her waist. “And here I thought that was why you’s such a killjoy.”

She slapped his chest once, twice, but the third time her hand made contact, it was to grip his shirt when he leaned in to kiss her.

 

She scheduled his appointment so he could sell some papers in the morning. She bought one of them to read while they sat in the waiting room, but he sat so rigidly that she couldn’t focus. She knew the stories already anyhow, but his tension was contagious.

“You're going to be fine,” she whispered to him.

He ducked his head down to whisper back. “Will it hurt?”

“Your mouth’ll be numb.” There was a time when she was a kid, surely no more than eight years old, that she went to a dentist and heard a man scream when they pulled out his tooth. She had cried so hard that her father took her home. Though he had read that anesthesia was for frauds, she refused to go back to the dentist unless they numbed it first. 

There was a low groan from one of the offices. Race jumped, his hand flying for hers, but he quickly stopped himself and played it off as though he was fixing his hat.

He hummed something about the room smelling worse than the Lodge, but she stared at his hand. Should she take it? She saw the boys being awfully touchy when they were together, but they were much more subdued with her. She remembered the way her skin cried out for contact as a child. She would sometimes skin her knee on purpose in the hopes that her mom would bandage it up, like she had done for Crutchie, but it had never happened. She would reach for her father’s hand in public, but he would discreetly move it away. 

She had not exactly had a loving family. She hadn’t realized it until she met Jack, but it was true. She wasn’t certain, but she felt as though the first time her father had called her beautiful was in his office to Jack. When she met Jack, touching him in any way had been a heady experience; it had been that way with all of the boys. She had settled down some, but she wondered now if maybe the boys were eternally touch starved. Maybe, if she reached out to them, they would be happy about it.

With a mask of confidence, she reached out and took Race’s hand in hers. He looked down at their intertwined fingers with surprise, but his grip tightened. There was not a word spoken about it, but Katherine felt the tingles of it all the way to her toes. She had made the right decision.

When the doctor came, Race’s eyes were wide as he looked back at her.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” She was more than willing, but she knew what affect the question would have.

“Nah,” he said. He shook his head once, grounded, and walked back to the dentist’s chair. Watching him go, she wondered if either of her parents had worried like this when they watched her leave. She wondered why she was so nervous for him when she knew that the dentist was a very kind man. 

Anxious to calm herself, she grabbed the leftover papers from Race’s bag. She made herself useful in the streets, always within sight of the store window, and sold every paper he had left.

“Extra, extra! Tarantulas with wings found in Ohio!” Maybe Jack was more strategic with those boys than he let on.

“Local hot dogs contain actual dogs!” She saw him touching the boys all the time, ruffling hair and clapping a hand against a boy’s arm in greeting.

“Assassination attempt on the president!” She had assumed that he was just a touchy person, but maybe a lot of it had been for the benefit of orphan boys who didn’t have loving families to hold them if he didn’t.

It didn’t take long for her to sell the papers, not when she lied so confidently, so her pocket jingled with change that she would slip into the cigar box Race kept under his pillow later in the evening. When Race came out of the back room, she was sitting casually in her chair as though she had never left.

The doctor tried to talk to her about how he needed to take care of his teeth more. She listened until part way through his rant about the effectiveness of hard bristled toothbrushes, but her attention was captured by Race’s waving.

“‘S gaw’,” he said emphatically. 

Her eyebrows shot to her hairline. She knew what he was saying, but he looked so serious that she had to fight a smile. “What?”

“Gaw’!” 

When she continued to shake her head at him, he leaned forward to open his mouth in her face. A small bundle of bloody cotton was shoved into a gap in his line of straight teeth.

“Oof,” she said, waving a hand in front of her face. “If you brush your teeth more, maybe your breath will smell better.”

He rolled his eyes at her, but took her arm when she offered it to him to keep the peace. Race had wanted, at first, to get ice cream or cake or something of that sort. She had gaped at him, surprised that he had forgotten about the bleeding hole in his mouth so quickly.

“No, absolutely not,” she said resolutely. “You can’t eat anything like that yet. You’ll just hurt yourself more,”

“Gaf,” he said in a butchered attempt at her name. “‘Ease?”

“No! We’ll get something special,” she promised hurriedly. “Something that’ll keep until you can eat it.” She would make an effort, she promised herself as she looked at a display of candy with Race, to be more like Jack with the boys. They needed a family, and Katherine could help. 

She bought him a small bag of chocolate covered caramels. He cradled it with wide eyes. She remembered a conversation with Jack from a few months earlier when she had been horrified that he had never had a ice cream soda at her favorite shop. 

“They’re so cheap!” she had exclaimed.

“Sure, but they still cost more than what I can spend on an entire day of food,” he said. One of the hard parts of their relationship was the class difference, though they were learning to deal with it. There were so many things that she had taken for granted that he had never experienced. He had gotten very good at saying things as though they didn’t matter instead of getting embarrassed, but she was always a little embarrassed. She bought him one, basking in the way he smiled over it.

The chocolates, though cheap, were not the type of luxury that any of the newsies could treat themselves to. She was so busy wondering if Race would share them with the other boys that she did not think to keep him from looking in his bag when he went to put them away.

He did not bother to speak, but he raised an eyebrow at her when he saw the missing papes.

She sheepishly pulled the change from her pocket. “I wasn’t going to tell you that I sold them,” she mumbled. “I was just going to put the money with your things.”

He shook his head at her. You didn’t have to, his eyes said.

“I didn’t want you to lose any money.”

He rolled his eyes. They both knew that he could sell them back. It was one of the perks of the strike, after all. Even as he acted displeased, they both knew that he could use the money. He tugged on one of her curls; a gruff thank you. 

 

He did share the chocolates with the other boys, she decided when she went to visit him the next day. His cheek was swollen, but he grinned at her.

“Thanks, doll,” he exclaimed over a loud kiss on the cheek. He tossed an arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. She blinked up at him, a little dazzled by the enthusiasm, before she realized that he was always like that with the others. It was just the first time he had targeted her with the treatment.

The other newsies watched. None of them looked surprised about it, but she felt their eyes. Later that day, when she saw some of the boys thumb wrestling to pass the time, Elmer challenged her. When she made good jokes, it was not uncommon for somebody to smack her in appreciation or mock anger. They would invite her to squeeze onto benches with them. She would dance with any of the boys, maybe all of the boys, if somebody decided to bellow out a drinking song after a day of work.

She wasn’t sure how to classify the changes, exactly. For somebody who made a living off of describing the world around her, she had a lot of trouble describing her boys. It had seemed so much easier before she knew them personally, but once she started loving them, she felt like there wasn’t a word in any language that could express the pure magnitude of feeling that she felt when she looked at the newsies.

It wasn’t just Jack, who she thought that she might be in love with. It wasn’t just Crutchie, who sometimes told jokes so raunchy that the water she was drinking came spurting out her nose. Even Race, who always knew when she needed a hug, was not an adequate representative of the newsies for her. It was all of them, and she thought that maybe “mom” was not quite what she had become. Almost, but she felt too much like a friend to be a mom. 

She stopped trying to classify it after a day of Finch teaching her to shoot with his slingshot. Maybe good things don’t need to fit in neat boxes, however much she liked things fitting neatly. Maybe she could just love them, and they could just love her, and that would be enough.


End file.
